Terra Nova

I first read Terra Nova by Ted Tally in September of last year, during the first week of Senior Theater Festival, and I was bored. Everything seemed to move very slowly. I loved the characters, but the way the play was structured made it drag. Mostly, the scenes between Scott and his wife just felt dull. Even when there were moments of excitement, like when she tells Scott that she WILL have his child, seemed forced and unmotivated. Eventually, I read it again, and began to warm to it's slower pace. Still, it seemed like a very difficult play to stage while keeping an audience interested. The flashbacks and hallucinations do help with the pacing, but again, they seemed like devices and were inorganic changes of scene.

Seeing the play realized my fears about the structure. One problem that I came across were the given circumstances. It's very hard to keep the pacing at a watchable level when every character (with the exception of Katharine and Amundsen) is extremely tired. I commend the actors that were in the production, but a problem that springs out of the script is that since all of the characters are so tired, they move and talk very slowly with little animation in their voices (again, with notable exceptions) which, even with good actors, makes the whole thing drag.

Another issue is the length. Personally, I love watching plays, and having seen full productions ofHamlet, Long Day's Journey into Night, and Angels in America, and I can endure long plays. Even as little as fifteen years ago, it would have been ordinary for audiences to endure 3-hour-plus plays. Now, though, with the advent of the internet and the ease of access to entertainment, 3 hours feels too long for a lot of people. I personally do not have a problem with cutting long plays, classical or contemporary, to make them more streamlined for an audience.

All in all, I thought Terra Nova was a good play with strong characters and compelling scenes, hampered by some structural issues.